Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sat stone silent inside the courtroom at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, refusing to answer routine questions from the judge presiding over his arraignment for war crimes. Four other co-defendants, who are being tried alongside the man now commonly referred to as KSM, took their cues from the self-professed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and also refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the military commissions, in what their lawyers described as an act of “peaceful resistance.”

That was the scene at the chaotic, marathon hearing that took place at Guantanamo May 7, and just the latest example of how, over the years, KSM “has controlled the legal proceedings against him, organizing his fellow captives to act as a group and then putting himself in charge,” journalists Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer write in their timely and groundbreaking new book, “The Hunt for KSM.”

KSM “mocked the military courts, preached, instructed, or obstructed as the need arose …” McDermott and Meyer write.

“The Hunt for KSM,” subtitled, “Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” is not just a page-turning spy thriller that masterfully reveals how the FBI and CIA failed to capture Mohammed at least a half-dozen times in the eight years leading up to 9/11, but it’s also a story about the investigative reporters’ own decade-long “hunt” for intelligence about “one of the worst mass murderers in American history.”

Ten years ago, while working as reporters at The Los Angeles Times, McDermott, Meyer and their colleague Patrick McDonnell published the first substantive profile of KSM, describing him as the “operational commander of Al Qaeda” most responsible for the terrorist organization’s attacks, whose significance was “underestimated” by the FBI.

“He was under everybody’s radar,” a senior FBI official told the reporters at the time. “We don’t know how he did it. We wish we knew…. He’s the guy nobody ever heard of.”

Exactly how KSM “did it” is what McDermott and Meyer were determined to find out. What they discovered in the decade since they published that 9,000-word report in The Los Angeles Times is truly disturbing and, yet again, undercuts the government’s narrative about who knew what and when. KSM eluded capture because no one, except for an FBI agent and a Port Authority detective, was looking for him prior to 9/11, yet everyone in intelligence and federal law enforcement circles knew where he was and knew what he was planning.

The FBI and CIA were so “laser focused” on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist network, which McDermott said he believes never was and isn’t now an “existential threat to the US,” that the agencies failed to comprehend KSM’s importance. Furthermore, the CIA and FBI never connected the dots related to the intelligence information in their possession that indicated how both men had “joined forces,” one of the intelligence community’s “greatest mistakes, McDermott said.

The lapses continued well after 9/11, due, in part, to the blame game going on between the CIA and FBI over the catastrophic attacks.

“I thought about this for a long time,” McDermott said in an interview. “Not only could 9/11 have been prevented it should have been prevented. I just think the number of mistakes that allowed KSM to evade capture is legion. If they [the CIA/FBI] put the effort into it they would have easily found him.”

Meyer agreed with his co-author. He recently told NPR, “If Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been taken off the battlefield or captured when the authorities had a chance to do that in the mid-’90s, there simply would not have been a 9/11 attack.”

The FBI is treated more favorably in their book, McDermott said, because the bureau “at least tried” to capture him.

A report I published with my colleague, Jeffrey Kaye, also described how, as early as 1999, a top-secret military intelligence unit likely identified the house where KSM planned the 9/11 attacks, according to documents we obtained. But for reasons that remain a mystery, the intelligence community appears to not have acted upon the information.

McDermott, who is also the author of a book on the 9/11 hijackers, “Perfect Soldiers,” said in addition to fleshing out the narrative about the “bureaucratic ineptitude” that allowed KSM to hide in plain sight while working on other terrorist attack plans, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, he and Meyer were also determined to craft a deeper story about KSM, the man and the intelligence officials who tracked him.

They split their reporting duties into “cops and robbers,” with McDermott traveling to Pakistan and the Middle East to speak with KSM’s associates and family members, and Meyer, currently co-director of the National Security Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, working his sources at the FBI and CIA.

“When you’re researching someone who are you going to talk to?” McDermott said. “You’re going to talk to friends, family and co-workers. You just keep knocking on doors, send letters, faxes, courier deliveries. Eventually, you find enough people who will talk to you that you have a story. And that’s what this was.”

Their gumshoe reporting paid off big time. KSM, the authors discovered, was a “rebellious” youth who, along with a cousin, “climbed the flagpole atop their elementary schoolhouse and tore down the Kuwaiti flag.” KSM was also an excellent student who “excelled” at science. At 16, KSM followed in the footsteps of his brother and began attending camps of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is where he “first heard the call to jihad.”

Humanizing KSM, however, was “stupidly difficult,” McDermott said.

“It was hard in a dumb, mulish way,” McDermott said. “I found KSM’s brother after looking for him for 10 years. And then he wouldn’t talk to me. He threw me off of his doorstep and threatened to have me arrested for invasion of privacy. I said, ‘Jesus Christ, man, your brother’s a mass murderer!’”

After KSM was captured in March 2003, McDermott said the CIA, then headed by George Tenet, ultimately won the internal blame war against the FBI over 9/11 failures, which ultimately allowed the agency to implement a program micromanaged by Vice President Dick Cheney: enhanced interrogation.

“Vice President Dick Cheney went on national television and warned that the United States would no doubt have to venture onto the ‘dark side’ in order to pursue and punish its enemies,” McDermott and Meyer write. “Cheney, more than any other individual, was the architect of the new War on Terror. He made it clear that doubt and nuance had no role to play in this new world. The FBI’s customary ways of doing business were not a fit for what Cheney had in mind, and perhaps chiefly for that reason the Bureau lost its status as the preeminent antiterror agency.”

McDermott said he believes the catalyst that led the Bush administration to implement the torture program was trying to find out “what’s the next attack?” I don’t agree with McDermott’s assertion as I am of the mind that the torture program was about exploitation, obtaining false confessions and turning captives into informants.

“The CIA was looking for something that didn’t exist,” McDermott said during our interview, explaining why KSM was brutalized. “The CIA’s sole focus was on the next attack. Here’s the problem: there was no next attack, there were hundreds of them. There were a multitude of plots. The CIA was looking for the next ‘spectacular’ and there was none. I’ve always wondered why torture was used too. Aside from the immorality of it, we know torture doesn’t work. The person being tortured will say anything to make the torture stop. But [the CIA] used it anyway. The outcome was almost fated.”

The information the CIA obtained by torturing KSM was “bad, made up,” he would later say, “so the torture would stop.” His false confessions, the cornerstone of the program, however, sent intelligence and law enforcement officials on “wild goose chases”–literally–in an attempt to stop nonexistent terrorist attacks.

“He had us chasing the goddamn geese in Central Park because he said some of them had explosives stuffed up their ass,” former FBI counterterrorism agent, Ali Soufan, told the authors.

McDermott and Meyer write that in addition to being waterboarded, a form of controlled drowning, 183 times, KSM was deprived of sleep for a week, “hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, beaten, kicked, suffocated, exposed to extreme cold and noise, denied food and sleep, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers and hung by his wrists until they bled.”

“KSM bragged later about sending American agents scurrying around the globe on the impossible task of trying to distinguish the truths from the half truths and lies,” McDermott and Meyer write.

Those details are what makes “The Hunt for KSM” required reading. Its revelations are an important reminder that the government has been in control of the narrative for far too long.

The years KSM spent at CIA black site prisons around the world, where his interrogators used methods of torture to extract false confessions, all but ensures that “his full story will never be told” and justice will never truly be served to the mass murderer.

“For reasons that perplex even its best friends, the United States has kept Mohammed in the shadows of its secret prisons for so long it seems likely he can now never be fully exposed to the light for fear of what he might say about what went on in the darkness.”

KSM secured his final victory a couple of years ago when Congress thwarted Attorney General Eric Holder’s efforts to prosecute KSM and four other 9/11 co-defendants in federal court in New York City. Democrat and Republican lawmakers feared his trial in Article III courts would make the city vulnerable to another terrorist attack.

It is through KSM’s “ability to strike fear, which is the first goal of all terrorism,” McDermott and Meyer write, that the true mastermind of the 9/11 attacks has been able to retain “his power,” even to this day, as evidenced by the initial response to Holder’s announcement about the venue in which KSM would be prosecuted.

“KSM, years after he was last able to issue a single order, remained, in some real sense, in command.”

A protester outside George Washington University. Photo: Dustin Slaughter

An honorable degree?

“I am concerned that George Washington University – an American icon – is sending the wrong message to Mexicans wanting to come to this country to work hard and build a life,” Jeffrey Brewer, an Occupy D.C. Protester, says to me.

“What are George Washington University’s values? Do they want to hold up exploitation as a legitimate business model?” he adds.

About 30 protesters (a mix of Occupy participants as well as members of a coalition called Two Countries, One Voice) are outside GW University posing this question to the institution on May 11^th, 2012, while a handful meet with administrators inside. Their stated goal is convincing the university to cancel a decision to give an honorary degree to Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world, at their May 20th commencement ceremony.

Their questions and anger are valid, considering that this esteemed institution wants to honor a tycoon accused of overcharging poor and working class Mexicans to the tune of $6 billion per year in cell and landline fees. Slim has a net worth of $69 billion dollars.

Slim has amassed this unimaginable wealth by owning 90% of Mexico’s telecommunication services and over 220 companies under the corporate behemoth Grupo Carso (basically giving Slim a 7% stake in Mexico’s GDP.)

In a country where the average citizen earns $15 per day and the per capita income is a little over $14,000 a year, one might wonder what George Washington University sees in this man to bestow an honorary degree.

The university touts Slim’s philanthropy as sufficient cause for honoring him. Problematic, however, is the fact that alleged philanthropic endeavors, such as the Fundación Carlos Slim Helú, are not required by Mexican law to publish financial information, so there is no way to confirm how much of his wealth has actually gone to improving the lives of people in Mexico. Carlos Slim has been publicly critical of charitable giving from billionaires such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

George Washington University has not responded to a request for comment.

A protester implores university officials to break ties with Carlos Slim. Photo: Dustin Slaughter

Two Peoples United

“The first part of the plan is to force the university to sever ties with Slim,” Two Countries, One Voice organizer David Abrams tells me on the car ride over to the rally, “although I doubt they’re going to cancel his commencement invite. After that, we begin targeting American industries who maintain business relationships with him,” including calls for boycotts which he and others plan on carrying on long after the May 20^th event. According to him, there may be hunger strikes involved too.

Companies in which Slim has stakes include Apple, Citigroup, and even the New York Times – which borrowed $240 million from him at a whopping 14% interest rate.

What does it take to stand up to the wealthiest man in the world? This coalition may have a fighting chance. The group is composed of a wide range of organizations, such as Consejo de Federaciones Mexicanas en Norteamérica (COFEM) and Nevada’s Latin Chamber of Commerce. It is worth noting that the Chamber’s membership has some heavy hitters on its board, and may have commercial interests in any successful outcome.

Abrams’s work on the ground has also brought members of Occupy Wall Street into the fold, he tells me. “It was a pretty easy sell,” he says of the effort. “After all, Carlos Slim IS the 1%.”

Check out Salon writer Adam Clarke Estes’ comprehensive background on Carlos Slim from March 8th, 2011.

Dustin M. Slaughter is the Founder of The David and Goliath Project. Follow him on Twitter: @DustinSlaughter.

This image of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was taken in July 2009 under an agreement with Guantanamo prison camp staff that lets Red Cross delegates photograph detainees and send photos to family members.

The eyes of the world were on Guantánamo, as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of planning and facilitating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi and Walid bin Attash — appeared in a courtroom for the first time since December 2008. All were dressed in white, apparently at the insistence of the authorities at Guantánamo, and most observers made a point of noting that Mohammed’s long gray beard was streaked red with henna.

For the Obama administration and the Pentagon, the five men’s appearance — for their arraignment prior to their planned trial by military commission — was supposed to show that the commissions are a competent and legitimate alternative to the federal court trial that the Obama administration announced for the men in November 2009, but then abandoned after caving in to pressure from Republicans. The five defendants face 2,976 counts of murder — one for each of the victims of the 9/11 attacks — as well as charges of terrorism, hijacking, conspiracy and destruction of property, and the prosecution is seeking the death penalty.

Unfortunately for the administration, the omens were not good. The military commissions have been condemned as an inadequate trial system ever since the Bush administration first resurrected them in November 2001, intending, in the heat of post-9/11 vengeance, to use them to swiftly try and execute those it regarded as terrorists. However, after long delays and chaotic hearings, this first reincarnation of the commissions was struck down as illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006. The commissions were then revived by Congress a few months later, and were then tweaked and revived by President Obama in the summer of 2009, despite criticism from legal experts.

However, in all these years, just seven cases have been decided. Under Bush, there was a plea deal for the Australian David Hicks; a short sentence for Salim Hamdan, who drove a car for Osama bin Laden; and a life sentence for Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who made a video for al-Qaeda, and refused to participate in his trial. Since Obama revived the commissions another four cases have been decided by plea deal — those of Ibrahim al-Qosi, a cook; Omar Khadr, a child at the time of his capture; Noor Uthman Muhammed, a training camp instructor; and Majid Khan, an alleged accomplice of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Another case — that of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged bomber of the USS Cole — is also proceeding to trial, but it is fair to say that the 9/11 trial is the barometer of whether or not the commissions are credible, or whether they are a second-tier judicial system, and the proceedings are little better than show trials.

On that basis, Saturday’s arraignment rather spectacularly failed to fulfil the administration’s hopes. As the Guardian noted, the hearing “descended into chaos,” as the defendants “refused to acknowledge the judge and their lawyers repeatedly challenged the legitimacy of the court.”

At the last appearance of the five men in 2008, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had tried to plead guilty, and to become a martyr by being executed, but on Saturday he was more in the mood for quiet resistance, undermining the proceedings by refusing to acknowledge the judge. As the Washington Post described it, “The normally loquacious Mohammed refused to speak publicly throughout Saturday’s hearing, a stance that was largely adopted by all the other defendants, who tend to follow his lead.”

Also noteworthy was the behavior of Walid bin Attash, an amputee, who was brought to the courtroom strapped into a restraining chair, after some kind of altercation outside, and only had his restraints removed when he promised to behave, and the behavior of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, whose mental health has long been called into question by his lawyers.

At one point bin al-Shibh and Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali interrupted the proceedings by praying, at at another point bin al-Shibh shouted out, comparing Guantánamo to the prisons of Muammar Gaddafi, the former dictator of Syria. “Era of Gaddafi is over but you have Gaddafi in [Guantánamo] camp,” he said, adding, “Maybe they are going to kill us and say that we are committing suicide.” This was a sign, perhaps, that he had heard of the dubious circumstances in which five prisoners died at Guantánamo: three in June 2006, and two others in 2007 and 2009, and had even, perhaps, heard about the dubious death, in a Libyan prison in May 2009, of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of a training camp in Afghanistan who had also been held in CIA “black sites,” and had been rendered to Egypt, where, under torture, he had falsely confessed that there were connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which, nevertheless, were used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

The arraignment took 13 hours to complete, although that was largely because of the men’s defense lawyers, who persistently attempted to question the credibility of the commissions, and made the most of their opportunity to question the judge’s impartiality, through the process known as voir dire. While this was happening, the defendants were mostly silent, and passed around the latest copy of the Economist, which may or may not have provided a boost to the London-based weekly magazine’s appeal. According to the Washington Post, throughout the hearing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “whispered messages to his comrades, and they chatted and joked with one another during a short recess.”

By the end of the arraignment, none of the defendants had entered a plea, and the judge, Army Col. James Pohl, adjourned proceedings until June 12, and tentatively set a trial date of May 2013, although, as the Guardian explained, he “acknowledged that there are likely to be more delays.” Throughout the day, he had tried to maintain his composure, but occasionally appeared rattled. When it became clear that the accused were going to refuse to participate in the proceedings, he stated that a plea of not guilty would eventually be entered on their behalf, adding, “One cannot choose not to participate and frustrate the normal course of business,” and at another point he asked in exasperation, “Why is this so hard?”

Leading the defense’s complaints on Saturday, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s lawyer, David Nevin, told the court that “the world is watching” the proceedings, and when the accused removed their headphones, through which they were receiving a translation of what Judge Pohl was saying, he explained that, in Mohammed’s case, “The reason he’s not putting the headphones in his ears is because of the torture imposed on him.” Nevin then “asked to be allowed to elaborate,” as the Guardian described it, but Judge Pohl refused.

Nevin’s attempts to raise the question of the men’s torture in secret CIA prisons for up to three and a half years before their transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006 was the most explicit attempt to allow discussion of how the men have been treated, although as was noted in the Daily Beast by Terry McDermott (the author, with Josh Meyer, of The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), Judge Pohl deflected almost all the defense’s arguments, telling the lawyers that there would be time for them to raise whatever they thought was important at the next hearing in June. As McDermott explained, “He indicated he would eventually allow defense lawyers to argue every issue they wanted.”

In his perceptive article, McDermott noted that, after Walid bin Attash’s attorney, Cheryl Borman, had told Judge Pohl that her client had been “repeatedly beaten by guards at Guantánamo,” he was obliged to point out that the treatment of the prisoners was something over which he “had little or no control,” although he stated that he “would investigate with the relevant authorities.” For McDermott, his “relative powerlessness over events beyond the courtroom” provided a vivid demonstration of the “central contradiction” of the commissions, which he described as “the attempt to conduct trials granting nearly all rights enjoyed in US courts when the defendants are prisoners in one of the most heavily controlled prisons in the world — held, usually in solitary confinement, under extreme security with almost all access to the outside world eliminated.”

As McDermott added:

Their lawyers are thousands of miles away and require special flights just to get to Guantánamo. Even when there, the lawyers are unable to talk with their clients about anything the American military decides is classified. This includes all issues having to do with the prisoners’ treatment. Thus, defense lawyers can’t talk in court about the specifics of their clients’ complaints.

Just before the hearing began, the ACLU submitted a motion (PDF) calling for the judge “to reject the government’s attempts to censor any statements by defendants in the 9/11 military commission proceedings about their detention and treatment in US custody.”

As the ACLU explained:

[T]he government has asked or will ask this Commission to issue a protective order accepting the government’s claim that any statements made by the defendants concerning their “exposure” to the Central Intelligence Agency’s (“CIA”) detention and interrogation program are presumptively classified and must be kept from the public. The government has also asked or will ask the Commission to accept its assertion that defendants’ statements concerning their personal knowledge and experience of their imprisonment and treatment in Department of Defense (“DOD”) custody are classified and must be suppressed.

The ACLU also asked the judge not to accept the government’s insistence that there must be “a 40-second delay in the audio feed the government makes available to the public, media, and representatives of non-governmental organizations who observe the tribunal,” in order to “permit a courtroom security official to cut off the audio feed whenever the defendants describe their detention and interrogation in US custody.”

The 40-second delay was only used briefly on one occasion on Saturday, apparently when Walid bin Attash said something that prosecutors wanted suppressed, but how secrets are dealt with is central to the 9/11 trial and its claim to credibility, and it remains to be seen whether Judge Pohl will genuinely acknowledge the tensions between the absolute secrecy surrounding the Bush administration’s torture program and the need for something that resembles a fair hearing in the men’s trial by military commission.

What is clear, at present, is that, in the five years and eight months since Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, his co-defendants and nine other “high-value detainees” arrived at Guantánamo from the CIA’s secret prisons, the only words that any of them have uttered that have been made available to the public are the words they said at their pre-trial hearings — in the cases of KSM and his co-accused, what they said in June, September and December 2008, and on Saturday. Everything else — every single word that has been exchanged between these 14 men and their lawyers — is presumptively classified.

This not unusual in the sense that every word exchanged between the other prisoners in Guantánamo and their lawyers is also presumptively classified, but in the cases of the other prisoners, at least parts of these exchanges have been unclassified after being reviewed by a team of Pentagon censors known as the privilege review team. In the cases of the “high-value detainees,” however, every single word remains classified.

The only possible reason for this is to prevent any discussion of of the torture to which these men were subjected in CIA “black sites” from leaking out of Guantánamo.

This is something that was noted last week in an article for Salon by the commissions’ former chief prosecutor, Col. Morris Davis, who resigned in October 2007, when he was placed in a chain of command under William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s General Counsel, who insisted that information derived through the use of torture would be used in the commissions.

Dismissing the administration’s spurious claims that military commissions are necessary because soldiers on a battlefield cannot spend their time worrying about reading rights to prisoners in wartime, Col. Davis stated:

[T]he reason the apologists want a second-rate military commission option is because of what we did to the detainees, not because of what the detainees did to us. This is not about the exigencies of the battlefield and the problems our soldiers face trying to fight a war; this is about torture, coercion, rendition and a decade or more in confinement without an opportunity to confront the evidence — abuses that would have us up in arms if done to an American citizen by some other country — that make the tarnished military commissions uniquely suited to try and accommodate the small category of cases where we crossed over to the dark side.

And that, in short, is the key problem with the commissions that dare not speak its name, and that Judge Pohl will have to decide whether or not to tackle — whether the search for justice is even possible when those who are supposed to be subjected to it were also the victims of America’s journey to “the dark side.”

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Jose Rodriguez, former Director of the CIA's National Clandestine Service

Law-abiding US citizens have been appalled that Jose Rodriguez, the director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service until his retirement in 2007, was invited onto CBS’s “60 Minutes” program last weekend to promote his book Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, in which he defends the use of torture on “high-value detainees” captured in the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” even though that was — and is — illegal under US and international law.

Rodriguez joins an elite club of war criminals — including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — who, instead of being prosecuted for using torture, or authorizing its use, have, instead, been allowed to write books, go on book tours and appear on mainstream TV to attempt to justify their unjustifiable actions.

All claim to be protected by the “golden shield” offered by their inside man, John Yoo, part of a group of lawyers who aggressively pushed the lawlessness of the “war on terror.” Abusing his position as a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, whose mandate is to provide impartial legal advice to the executive branch, Yoo instead attempted to redefine torture and approved its use — including the use of waterboarding, an ancient torture technique and a form of controlled drowning — on an alleged “high-value detainee,” Abu Zubaydah, in two memos, dated August 1, 2002, that will forever be known as the “torture memos.”

Unfortunately, for those who abhor the use of torture and respect the rule of law, President Obama refused to allow Yoo — and his boss, Jay S. Bybee — to be punished. A four-year internal ethics investigation concluded in January 2010 that Yoo and Bybee had been guilty of “professional misconduct,” which would have led to professional sanctions, but a senior DoJ fixer, David Margolis, was allowed — or encouraged — to override those conclusions, stating instead that both men had, understandably, been under great pressure following the 9/11 attacks, and had only exercised “poor judgment,” which was the equivalent of nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

No one bothered mentioning that Article 2.2 of the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, to which the US became a signatory under Ronald Reagan, declares: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

And so, last Sunday, Jose Rodriguez was allowed to undertake his own redefinition of torture, essentially unchallenged, and on mainstream TV. With a disturbingly macho presentation that left Charles Pierce of Esquire “pretty convinced that Rodriguez is both a sociopath and a maniac,” as well as a war criminal, he brushed off criticism of the use of torture by saying, “We made some al-Qaeda with American blood on their hands uncomfortable for a few days, but we did the right thing for the right reason. The right reason to protect the homeland and to protect American lives.”

As Amy Davidson noted in the New Yorker, he also “bragged about its use in proving the manhood of the torturer,” stating, “We needed to get everybody in government to put their big boy pants on and provide the authorities that we needed,” and “talked as if torture were an expression of strength, rather than momentary domination masking the most abject moral and practical weakness.” For Glenn Greenwald, the reference to “big boy pants” exposed “a whole new level of psychosexual creepiness.”

On specific techniques, Rodriguez defended the use of waterboarding by saying, of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was subjected to waterboarding 183 times, “I don’t know what kind of man it takes to cut the throat of someone in front of a camera like that [a reference to KSM's unproved confession that he personally killed US journalist Daniel Pearl], but I can tell you this is probably someone who didn’t give a rat’s ass about having water poured on his face.”

He also defended the use of physical violence and nudity by pointing out that “[t]he objective is to let him [the detainee] know there’s a new sheriff in town and he better pay attention,” compared sleep deprivation to “jet lag,” and, reflecting on the use of “stress positions” over many hours, said, “I was thinking about this the other day. The objective was to induce muscle fatigue, and most people who work out do a lot more fatiguing of the muscles.”

At another point in the interview, Rodriguez also made reference to the psychologists — including James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen — who had worked on the US military’s program for using torture to train US personnel to resist interrogation if captured by a hostile enemy, which was reverse engineered and provided the basis of the torture program in the “war on terror.” Their particular contribution was to stress that detainees must be broken down to a state of “learned helplessness” (a concept conceived by US psychologist Martin Seligman in the 1960s), in which all resistance is futile, and the detainee becomes completely dependant on his interrogators. Speaking of this, Rodriguez stated, “This program was about instilling a sense of hopelessness and despair on the terrorist, on the detainee, so that he would conclude on his own that he was better off cooperating with us.”

To be spouting all of the above on mainstream TV without, essentially, any comeback from the host, Lesley Stahl, or from those who should be enforcing America’s obligations to prosecute torturers, is depressing enough, but it was not all that was wrong. Rodriguez also spoke openly of the crime for which he is most generally known — the destruction of 92 videotapes that contained the “interrogations” in Thailand of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, another “high-value detainee” who was waterboarded. As Glenn Greenwald explained last week:

At the time the destruction order was issued, numerous federal courts — as well as the 9/11 Commission — had ordered the US Government to preserve and disclose all evidence relating to interrogations of Al-Qaeda and 9/11 suspects. Purposely destroying evidence relevant to legal proceedings is called “obstruction of justice.” Destroying evidence which courts and binding tribunals (such as the 9/11 Commission) have ordered to be preserved is called “contempt of court.” There are many people who have been harshly punished, including some sitting right now in prison, for committing those crimes in far less flagrant ways than was done here. In fact, so glaring was the lawbreaking that the co-Chairmen of the 9/11 Commission — the mild-mannered, consummate establishmentarians Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean — wrote a New York Times Op-Ed pointedly accusing the CIA of “obstruction” (“Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation”).

As with John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, Rodriguez was never punished. An investigation into the destruction of the videotapes began under George W. Bush, and continued under Obama, but in November 2010 the DoJ announced that the investigation would be closed without any charges being filed. As Greenwald explained, Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who had ordered the CIA to preserve and produce the tapes, “refused even to hold the CIA in contempt for deliberately disregarding his own order.” Instead, he “reasoned that punishment for the CIA was unnecessary because, as he put it, new rules issued by the CIA ‘should lead to greater accountability within the agency and prevent another episode like the videotapes’ destruction.’”

However, while Rodriguez — like John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and senior Bush administration officials, up to and including the President — continues to get away with his crimes, it is uncertain if, overall, the apologists for torture are winning. For them to succeed in persuading enough ordinary Americans that the law doesn’t actually apply to the US president, or anyone working for him, they also need to establish that all this torturing kept America safe, and on this front, despite their protestations over the years, they have no proof that torture worked.

In his interview, Rodriguez wheeled out the tired old lies about torture leading to the capture of “high-value detainees.” In a moment of courage, Lesley Stahl mentioned well-established claims that Abu Zubaydah’s torture had led operatives on countless wild goose chases, to which Rodriguez replied, “Bullshit. He gave us a road map that allowed us to capture a bunch of Al-Qaeda senior leaders.” In contrast, of course, former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan pointed out last year that torture did not yield important leads, and that, for example, information from Abu Zubaydeh pointing to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad’s central role in the 9/11 attacks came before the CIA’s torturers took over his interrogations.

Soufan also pointed out the difference between torturers and skilled interrogators, which CNN described as follows:

“There is a difference between compliance and cooperation,” he said. Compliance can result from torture — a detainee will do anything to make the rough treatment end. But real cooperation, says Soufan, comes from engaging the detainee after learning everything possible about them.

Torture’s apologists always want to deny the importance of skilled interrogators, who conduct extensive research on their subjects and often spend a long time building up a rapport with them. Instead, they permanently seek to reinforce the macho idiocy of their preferred approach, which is driven more by vengeance and bloodlust than anything else.

In Rodriguez’s case, he also resorted to claims that torture had led to the capture of Osama bin Laden, telling Dana Priest of the Washington Post last week, “I am certain, beyond any doubt, that these techniques, approved at the highest levels of the US government, certified by the Department of Justice, and briefed to and supported by bipartisan leadership of congressional intelligence oversight committees, shielded the people of the United States from harm and led to the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden.”

In response, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, issued a joint statement (PDF) condemning the remarks made by Rodriguez and others — including former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former CIA director Michael Hayden — who had leapt on the bandwagon as the anniversary of bin Laden’s death approached, calling them “inconsistent with CIA records,” and “misguided and misinformed,” and expressing their disappointment that “Mr. Rodriguez and others, who left government positions prior to the OBL operation and are not privy to all of the intelligence that led to the raid, continue to insist that the CIA’s so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ used many years ago were a central component of our success.”

The statement, as the New York Times explained, “rebutted various claims that critical information about bin Laden’s courier” came from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or from Abu Faraj al-Libi, another “high-value detainee,” seized in Pakistan in 2005, and held at Guantánamo, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 13 other “high-value detainees,” since September 2006. In addition, the Times noted that the statement “rejected claims that tough treatment drew valuable information about bin Laden’s courier from a third detainee, unidentified in the statement,” but elsewhere identified as Hassan Ghul, another “high-value detainee,” seized in Iraq in 2004, who was never held at Guantánamo. The statement noted that, “While this third detainee did provide relevant information, he did so the day before he was interrogated by the CIA using their coercive interrogation techniques.”

“Instead,” the Times explained, Sens. Feinstein and Levin stated, without elaborating, that “the CIA learned of the existence of the courier, his true name and location through means unrelated to the CIA detention and interrogation program.”

This is significant, but what is needed now is for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to complete its comprehensive review of the CIA’s former detention and interrogation program, and publish it. As the statement also explained, “Committee staff have reviewed more than 6 million pages of records and the Committee’s final report, which we expect to exceed 5000 pages, will provide a detailed, factual description of how interrogation techniques were used, the conditions under which detainees were held, and the intelligence that was — or wasn’t — gained from the program.”

As Dan Froomkin explained in the Huffington Post, the investigation by Democrats, which has taken nearly three years, and has involved Republican lawmakers refusing to take part, “concludes that records from the Bush administration fail to support claims that torture was effective in stopping any terrorist attack,” or in leading to the discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden last year.

While people like Jose Rodriguez remain free to peddle their lies and distortions about torture, and to profit from it, America’s name not only continues to be tarnished, but the American public also continue to be shamefully misled. The long-awaited report into the CIA’s torture program should be published as soon as possible, to let people know what really happened, and hopefully to play a part in tearing down the “golden shield” that has so far protected the Bush administration’s torturers from prosecution.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Former Office of Legal Counsel Acting Chief Steven Bradbury

An article in the July-Sept. 2004 edition of the journal Military Intelligence (PDF) sheds further light on the origins of the Army Field Manual (AFM) on interrogation, FM 2-22.3, HUMINT Collector Operations (PDF), that became operational in September 2006. The AFM became the de jure standard for government interrogations in the “Global War on Terror” as a matter of policy with the passing of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (DTA). Except, in 2005, the AFM was an earlier version.

By September 2006, the newer version included less restrictive controls on a number of questionable interrogation techniques, and had seriously lightened the restriction on the use of drugs in interrogations. It also included an annex to the manual, Appendix M, that was meant strictly for detainees not covered by Geneva POW protections, i.e., the detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Appendix M allowed for the use of isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation (as a “field expedient” method), and anticipated at least some use of environmental and diet “manipulations.”

But back in Summer 2004, Command Sergeant Major Lawrence J. Haubrich, U.S. Army Military Intelligence Corps, writing for the journal Military Intelligence (PDF) about military ethics in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, noted that the new AFM had already been vetted by Judge Advocate General corps’ [JAG] legal officials.

The DA [Dept. of the Army] Office of the JAG and JAG School reviewed each draft of FM 2-22.3, HUMINT Collector Operations, and each draft has been (and still is) in compliance with all Geneva Conventions, international agreements, and U.S. law. Additionally, the manual clarifies the responsibilities of HUMINT collectors and clearly delineates between HUMINT collection and other activities associated with internment operations. Finally, the manual now includes HUMINT collection techniques like strategic debriefing and elicitation as a result of the recent HUMINT and Counterintelligence Integrated Concept Team and lessons learned.

We can’t, of course, know what drafts the JAG officials had seen in 2004. We don’t know, for instance, whether or to what degree the techniques that ended up in the final document’s Appendix M were then included in the earlier drafts. The fact that the manual went through numerous iterations was noted in a couple of blog posts by Marcy Wheeler, who noted the existence of a little examined Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel memorandum (PDF) on the AFM and its Appendix M.

“The Department of Defense (“DOD”) has asked us to review for form and legality the revised drafts of the Army Field Manua1 2-22.3 (“Human Intelligence Collection Operations”), Appendix M of FM2-22.3 (“Restricted Interrogations Techniques”), and the Policy Directive regarding DOD’s Detainee Program,” Acting Attorney General Stephen Bradbury wrote in an April 13, 2006 “Memorandum for the Files.” Naturally, Bradbury found that Appendix M was “consistent with the requirements of the law, in particular with the requirements of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005…”

Wheeler noticed a couple of years ago, however, that the description of Appendix M in the Bradbury memorandum was not congruent with the version that was ultimately published.

Speaking of all those references to specific paragraphs of Appendix M, note that Bradbury wrote this memo on April 13, 2006. Appendix M was not finalized and released until September 6, 2006. And the contents of Appendix M changed significantly between the time Bradbury wrote his approval letter and the time the Appendix was put into effect five months latter…. Even the title changed–from the plural “Restricted Interrogation Techniques” to the singular “Restricted Interrogation Technique–Separation”….

A couple of examples of some of the changes Wheeler pointed out (bold emphases in original):

Bradbury cites M-23 for language limiting the use of Appendix M only to DOD interrogators specially trained and certified to use these techniques; that language now appears in M-22, but the paragraph now authorizes properly trained contract interrogators and “non-DOD personnel” to use the techniques as well.

Bradbury cites M-21 for medical limits, including that “Detainees determined to be unfit for interrogation may not be interrogated” (note, this does not appear to be a direct citation from the appendix, but rather Bradbury’s summary of it); in the current Appendix, language on medical oversight appears in several places (M-16, M-20, M-23, M-24, M-30), but never includes an explicit restriction against using the techniques on an unfit detainee….

Then, just last August, Wheeler noted this in a legal opinion issued in the Donald Vance/Nathan Ertel lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld for the torture they suffered when falsely held prisoners in Iraq:

The plaintiffs contend that, after the enactment of the Detainee Treatment Act, Secretary Rumsfeld continued to condone the use of techniques from outside the Army Field Manual. ¶ 244. They allege that on the same day that Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act in December 2005, Secretary Rumsfeld added ten classified pages to the Field Manual, which included cruel, inhuman, and degrading techniques, such as those allegedly used on the plaintiffs (the plaintiffs refer to this as “the December Field Manual”). Id. The defendants describe this allegation as speculative and untrue, but we must accept these well-pled allegations as true at the Rule 12(b)(6) stage of the proceedings.8

On appeal, the plaintiffs 8 cite a newspaper article reporting on the development of this classified set of interrogation methods. See Eric Schmitt, “New Army Rules May Snarl Talks with McCain on Detainee Issue,” New York Times (Dec. 14, 2005), available at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/14/politics/14detain.html (last accessed Aug. 4, 2011) (“The Army has approved a new, classified set of interrogation methods… The techniques are included in a 10-page classified addendum to a new Army field manual…”). The plaintiffs contend that Secretary Rumsfeld eventually abandoned efforts to classify the Field Manual, but that the “December Field Manual” was in operation during their detention and was not replaced until September 2006, after plaintiffs had been released, when a new field manual (Field Manual 2-22.3) was instituted.

This is evidence of the likelihood that the changes to the AFM materially changed it from what the JAG officials vetted in 2004. Nevertheless, I don’t believe we have heard any protest or even a peep of protest from JAGs or other military legal sources over the AFM that was ultimately issued. The Bradbury memorandum itself is a deeply dishonest document, and relies heavily for its opinion on the earlier OLC memos by Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury himself. In the memorandum, Bradbury cites the earlier OCL torture memos as having “previously concluded that techniques virtually identical to these [i.e., in Appendix M] are consistent with applicable U.S. legal obligations…”

He then refers readers to the July 14, 2004 testimony of Patrick F. Philbin before the House Select Committee on Intelligence (PDF). “There is no need to revisit those determinations here,” Bradbury wrote. But since the Obama administration withdrew by Executive Order (13491) “All executive directives, orders, and regulations… from September 11, 2001, to January 20, 2009, concerning detention or the interrogation of detained individuals,” where does that leave the legal assurances regarding Appendix M?

This question is of high importance as, even though numerous human rights organizations (Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Amnesty International, Open Society Foundations, and others) have expressed grave misgivings about the abuse inherent in the current Army Field Manual instructions, the government, including key Democrats on the Intelligence and Armed Services committees, and the Obama administration itself, support the current AFM as the relevant and sufficient standard for all U.S. government military and CIA interrogations.

The inadequacy of the Bradbury memorandum in vetting “legal” techniques for interrogation, techniques said to be “Geneva compliant” is laughably belied by the fact that four of the six “restricted interrogation techniques” discussed by Bradbury are redacted in the declassified release of the memorandum. Truly, the government must think we can’t see what is right before our eyes.

Additionally, of the two techniques openly discussed — “Mutt and Jeff” (Good cop/Bad cop) and “False Flag — both were ultimately incorporated into the main text of the final AMF draft. Even though the other techniques were left unclassified in the final version, the government still censors the techniques Bradbury was describing in his 2006 memo.

In a particularly Bradburyian moment of bad conscience, or possibly only to cover his ass, the former top Bush lawyer remarks in a footnote, the “six restricted interrogation techniques” might not satisfy the DTA if used on “all DoD detainees” (italics in original). Even more: “Nor does our analysis suggest that these techniques would be lawful if used in the criminal justice process as a means of obtaining information about ordinary crimes.”

Hence we can see the result of the Bush-Gonzales-Yoo removal of the GWOT detainees from protected POW status soon after 9/11. Since Appendix M is still used in interrogations, we must conclude the Obama administration has never withdrawn the order that removed Al Qaeda/Taliban and associated prisoners from Geneva protections. Or has the administration has issued new opinions that have never been made public?

It must not matter to the Congressional oversight mavens, who have said not a peep about these issues, and continue to push the AFM and Appendix M. Nor does the proud JAG corps, who in some cases were known to protest the torture as it unfolded at Guantanamo, or the unfairness of the “Star Chamber” military commissions process, have any update I know of from their early stamp of approval given to the AFM.

One could not hope for much from a government that slaughtered two million Indochinese, and was never held accountable for that and many crimes that followed. It may be tilting at windmills to believe that the ongoing use of torture, even as one version of it is enshrined now in a formal military document, would become a matter of some social protest or media condemnation. This is a society and a nation totally adrift in a sea of moral nihilism when it comes to military and intelligence matters.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor to Truthout and The Public Record, blogs about civil liberties and issues revolving around the US government’s torture program at The Dissenter. He can be reached at sfpsych at gmail dot com. Follow Jeff on Twitter: @Jeff_Kaye

Pastor Terry Jones in March 2011

Burning the holy books which are interconnected with the hearts and souls of millions of people around the world is one of the most heinous and dreadful actions which one can think of. After decades of bloodshed and bigotry in the two World Wars, Civil War in the United States and Crusades against Muslims in the 11th and 12th centuries, burning the holy books can be interpreted as a new form of barbarity and ignorance in the modern era and an unforgivable crime which can be justified by no standards whatsoever.

Over the past decade, several cases of desecrating the holy book of Muslims, Quran, have been reported that incited the hatred and frustration of millions of Muslims and non-Muslims in the four corner of the globe.

In July 2010, an extremist Christian pastor Terry Jones gained widespread public attention when he announced that he would be burning copies of the Holy Quran on the anniversary of September 11 attacks for the alleged excuse that they were the Muslims who spearheaded the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and that Islam promotes violence and aggression. Of course such a terrible idea can be only issued by someone who suffers from an inferiority complex and yearns for attracting people’s attention. Taking a glance at the background of Terry Jones and what his former colleagues say about him, one can effortlessly figure out that the Christian pastor has always had an ambivalent personality and an air of self-importance which has made him an arrogant and supercilious man. After receiving an honorary degree from an unaccredited theology school in 1983 when he was 32, he began referring to himself as “Doctor” for which he was ultimately found guilty and condemned by a German administrative court.

Jones moved to Germany in 1981 and established a small church in Cologne named Christian Community of Cologne. As reported by the German publication “Der Spiegel,” the congregation fired him after a while, accusing him of spreading a “climate of fear and control” in the church. His colleagues say that he preached the congregants to beat their children with “rods” and also consumed the church funds for personal, improper purposes. What can be inferred from his biography is that the traces of sanity and reason can be barely found in his behavior and disposition.

In July 2010, he made the headlines by announcing his devilish plan for burning the copies of Holy Quran on an “International Burn a Quran Day.” Several heads of states, politicians, academicians, peace activists and journalists condemned his plan, and although he initially retreated from his decision, he finally set ablaze copies of the holy book of Muslims in Dove World Outreach Center’ss sanctuary on March 20, 2011.

Surprisingly, the Western politicians refused to express disapproval of this shocking venture and only stated that Terry Jones should cancel his plan simply because the lives of multinational forces in Iraq and Afghanistan might be endangered. Actually, the Western statesmen credulously overlooked the immoral and decadent nature of this action or simply refused to practice what they always preach: religious tolerance and diversity. Of course they would have no response to give if asked about the veracity of their claims of being supportive to religious freedom and tolerance. They offended and disappointed millions of Muslims with their silence and demonstrated that they have no respect for the beliefs of those who want to live alongside them in peace.

But the Quran burning controversy of 2011 did not mark an end to the adventurous ploys of Pastor Jones. The newspapers and TV stations across the world reported last week that Terry Jones once again burned copies of the Holy Quran and a portrait depicting Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) on Saturday, April 28 in what was claimed as his protest to the detainment of a so-called Christian clergyman in Iran.

Before committing this obscene act, Pentagon had urged Jones not to burn the Holy Quran for the sake of the security of Americans in uniform, but no other statement was released by Obama administration to prevent the insane pastor from doing such a crime. Gainesville Sun reported on April 29 that the Quran burning plan was attended by a number of local residents and was broadcast live on internet. Even a group of police officers patrolled around the church premises and provided security for the ceremony. The region’s fire department chief also said that Jones had received proper authorizations for burning certain materials on April 28, but it was not specified what the materials were.

Although the high-ranking officials of Islamic countries, including the Iranian statesmen condemned the renewed venture of burning the Holy Quran in strongest terms, the U.S. and European officials turned a blind eye to the blasphemy, tacitly endorsing the radical pastor.

However, what is clear is that Jones is certainly looking for national and international attention. He has established a campaign for the 2012 presidential elections and even created a website for his campaign with the slogan “Real America, Real Hope.” In this website, Jones has claimed that he is standing up to speak for “truth” and confront “Islamic radicalism.” This is unquestionably a testimony to his lunacy and provides evidence for the fact that this mad man has no clear ideology or worldview. If he is a real Christian pastor, then can he justify that insulting the holy book of a major religion is in compliance with the teaching of Christianity?

Different Christian institutions, including the World Evangelical Alliance have strongly condemned Terry Jones and asked the U.S. government to take action against him. An Islamic movement in Pakistan has called for the execution of Terry Jones; however, it seems that the Obama administration and the Israeli-dominated Congress are so coward and pitiable that they will get along with the appalling enterprise that has come out of their country.

Of course, it should not be neglected that Yusef Naderkhani, the so-called pastor who is in jail in Iran is not detained on charges of changing his religion or advocating Christianity. He is charged with sexual abuse and robbery and no death penalty, as the U.S. mainstream media pretend, has been issued for him. The problem of Terry Jones and people like him with Islam and its teaching is that Islam unveils the true evil nature of imperialism and this is something which the U.S. politicians and their stooges such as the pastor of a tiny church in Florida cannot tolerate.

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist and writer and a member of World Student Community for Sustainable Development.

In cooperation with Author/Journalist Douglas Valentine, Cryptocomb is publishing over 8GB’s of audio recordings that Mr. Valentine collected throughout his personal interviews with former CIA and U.S. Military Officers while researching for his book, “The Phoenix Program”. The Phoenix Program for the unacquainted was a CIA generated operation that sponsored mass arrests, terrorism, torture, murder and lies during the war in Vietnam. Many of the players went on to walk the halls of the Pentagon, Congress, the Department of Homeland Security, and major National Security Corporations.

Cryptocomb noted that the Phoenix Program “is the template for the targeted killings in the war on terror.” Valentine, the author of the groundbreaking book, “The Phoenix Program,” also made Phoenix Program documents available at Cryptocomb. On his website, Valentine said the materials  “show the development of ‘targeted kills,’ ‘administrative detention’ and ‘High Value’ rewards programs, among other things relevant to the eternal war on terror and Homeland Security.”

The interview Valentine conducted with William Colby, the former director of CIA who was chief of station in Vietnam who ran the agency’s covert operations in Southeast Asia, about the program is chilling.

Raymond Kelly at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival. Photo/Wikimedia

I got home at 10:00 pm on the nose, and the first thing I did was take off my shoes after 14 hours of May Day marching with 30-40,000 other conscientious objectors to capitalism. My feet hurt, okay? My second priority was turning on the local news, which happened to be Fox Five New York. According to my watch, it was 10:02. I didn’t see the first few seconds of the story, but it must have have been the lead. There was Ray Kelly, the chief of police, talking about…not Occupy Wall Street?…no, it was a video of him on some talk show, warning of the apparently imminent threat of Arab terrorists “implanting” bombs in their bodies and blowing up airplanes and buildings.

The reporter, whose name I didn’t catch, showed a mug shot of a sullen swarthy Arab terrorist who had confessed to “helping” his brother implant such a bomb. The reporter then interviewed a “security expert,” whose name I also didn’t catch. As I say, my feet hurt and I wasn’t paying full attention. The security expert speculated that the most you could fit into a man’s “cavity” would be a one pound bomb, and such a weapon probably couldn’t bring down an airplane. A woman, he said, could at most fit a one-pound bomb in one cavity and a two-pound bomb in her other cavity.

The reporter wanted to know what would happen if a large number of Arab terrorists implanted many such bombs on their bodies. The security expert said that many such bombs inside many such Arab terrorists, probably looking even more sullen and swarthy than usual, would increase the likelihood that our x-ray machines and first-rate Homeland Security personnel would detect them before they could blow up the airplane.

The next story was about some Republican heavyweight endorsing Romney. Maybe it was Giuliani, the great hero of 9/11. His name came up, I remember that. To reiterate: my feet were still hurting.

The third story started with the anchor saying something like, “In other security concerns today, Occupy Wall Street marchers paraded down Broadway…” The reporter asked several non-marching pedestrians, “Are you annoyed yet?” Some said yes, some said no, which was, I thought, very fair and balanced. More than 30 marchers were arrested, she reported. Ray Kelly, she further reported, estimated that the city had spent $30 million on Occupy Wall Street security since last fall…

Click here to read the rest of this report at ThisCantBeHappening.net

Trayvon Martin. Photo/Wikimedia

For years, my father, a federal employee with a top secret clearance, carried a copy of his birth certificate when he went into Baja California from our home in San Diego. Many times, when he tried to reenter the U.S., he was stopped by the Border Patrol.

My father had thick black hair and naturally dark skin, and the Patrol thought he was a Mexican brazenly trying to sneak back into the country by claiming to be married to the black-haired, blue- eyed, light-skinned woman he claimed was his wife. Once back home, he faced discrimination because neighbors thought he was Mexican; the ones who knew better discriminated because he was a Jew.

When I was 11 years old, we moved about 120 miles north to a suburb of Los Angeles. My parents bought a house in a new tract of about 150 houses, all owned by Whites and a few Hispanics. Three or four years later, a Realtor came by, plastering flyers on all the houses, announcing he had a special real good, one-time only deal. A few wouldn’t sell their houses at any price if it was a Black who was planning to move into the area. Someone in the tract finally took up the offer, and a Black family–he was a mechanical engineer–moved in. It didn’t take long before other White families began putting their houses up for sale. Only this time, they weren’t getting as much as the first family that sold out. Soon, the prices began tumbling as other Blacks and Hispanics moved in.

Eventually, the first Black family moved out. But my parents refused to sell their house. They had no intention of becoming involved with what was now known as “block busting.” A few of our Hispanic and Black neighbors wondered why we stayed; some even said we were crazy. But, until my father died in 1983, he owned that house in a neighborhood that went from almost 100 percent White to almost 100 percent Black, Hispanic, and lower-class White, refusing to be sucked in by racism.

Discrimination occurs throughout our country, whether we want to believe it or not.

At a synagogue in Sunbury, Pa., someone painted a swastika. In New York City, unidentified individuals threw several Molotov cocktails against a rabbi’s residence. These weren’t isolated incidents. The Anti-Defamation League says there were 1,239 reported incidents in 2010. [The 2011 number is still being tallied.]

Several American communities and the states of Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, and Utah have enacted oppressive anti-immigration laws. On the surface, it appears they want to rid their areas of illegal immigrants, acting only to protect law-and-order. But, the deeper structure is that they fear Hispanics, more of them legal immigrants or citizens of the U.S. than undocumented workers, will get political, educational, and financial power and would reduce the influence of the ultra-conservative White population.

At the University of California at San Diego, a fraternity of Whites sent out invitations to a “ghetto-themed” party, which it called the “Compton Cookout.” The invitation noted that “ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes.” At that same school last year, a Klan hood was placed on a statue of Dr. Seuss.

At innumerable local schools, where the teachers had “cultural diversity” classes in college and on-the-job “diversity training,” it’s not unusual to hear a few teachers telling racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic jokes, not just among themselves in a faculty lounge but also with students.

White supremacists shout for “White Pride!” and Black militants call for “Black Power!” Each claims they aren’t planning to destroy any other race–although myriad Klan and Skinhead actions prove otherwise–but merely to strengthen their own. Add into the mix, a few who will shout “racism” when no racism occurs and, thus, make it difficult for those with true compassion for justice to separate the truth from the fiction. Peel the rhetoric, and the core is still fear.

And that may be why the death of Trayvon Martin is so important. George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch leader in Sanford, Fla., killed Martin, Feb. 26. Zimmerman acknowledges he killed Martin, but claims it was in self-defense. Under Florida’s reactionary “stand your ground” law, borne from fear rather than logic, people who feel threatened can take whatever action they think necessary, even shooting Black teenagers who are armed only with a pack of Skittles.

There are numerous versions of what happened, all of them advanced by myriad people with social and political agendas rather than a search for justice, no matter what they claim. But, fear is at the core of the rhetoric. Mistrust and distrust, often fueled by the mass media with their own agendas, may lead some to irrationally believe that entire demographics of people—White, Black, Hispanic, gay, Jew, Muslim—may pose threats to their own safety, leading them to react as if the threats were real rather than imagined.

The reasons no longer matter to Trayvon Martin. The lesson however, should matter to the rest of us.

Walter Brasch is the recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. distinguished service award. His latest book is Before the First Snow; a major theme of the book looks at issues of racism and bigotry. The book is available from Greeley & Stone Publishers or Amazon.